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Comment by magduf | Hacker News Reader

Packaging is absolutely necessary for convenience and safety. You can't sell raw meat without a package, for instance; that idea is absurd and stupid. Do you really want to go back to the days when people were constantly suffering from and dying of easily-prevented food-borne illnesses?

For non-food items, packaging is necessary to minimize breakage in shipping. How much more garbage would there be if half the manufactured items were broken in transit?

Recycling is the proper answer to the proliferation of packaging. That we, as a society, aren't setting things up properly to facilitate this and minimize landfilling is our own failure, not that of the Chinese. There is absolutely no reason we can't have companies building large plants to collect recyclables and automatedly sort them and break them down for reprocessing into new packaging. If this isn't happening, it's because of a failure of governance.

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> You can't sell raw meat without a package, for instance; that idea is absurd and stupid.

Here in [some european country] preferred way of getting quality meat is at the market, where it is not prepackaged. Larger supermarkets also sell non-packaged meat. What did you mean by such strong assertion?

I mean, it probably still gets packaged in something, it's just not pre-packaged with needless amounts of plastics. (Although I guess I could probably hand them a box I brought in at the supermarket and they'd use it if I asked nicely. Never seen anyone do that though)

Here in the US, the better cuts of meat you get at a market, where they cut and weigh and package it for you on the spot. The keyword here is: "package". They still have to wrap it up in something, even if it's a special coated type of paper. That's a package. They're not going to just hand you a slab of bare meat with their bare hands.

Animal Agriculture Industrial Complex I believe is the worse offender of our planet anyway. Then there's the threat of another H1N1, Avian Flu, Food and Mouth, etc. only a matter of time before they rapidly evolve and overcome anti-biotics and cause a worldwide pandemic.

So may I suggest we simply do what we can to reduce our consumption of meat. As it is simply not sustainable right now.

Instead, try this, Cauliflower that looks like Chicken! Taste is close too!

http://sweetpotatosoul.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Vegan-...

Or burger pattie that is made from Banana flower (i'm from the tropics).

I am hunting for it right now, but I recently read about how soy production has equalled or is getting really close environmental impact of beef.

You must remember that most of these Soy are not for us, but for beef.

> Soybean meal is the largest source of protein feed in the world, and is generally used in animal feed. Therefore, most of the world's soybeans are consumed indirectly by humans through products like meat (chicken, pork and beef), dairy, eggs and farmed fish.

http://wwf.panda.org/our_work/food/agriculture/soy/consumers...

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